I've been inspired by a painting in my house to try something a bit more complex. Most of my personal artwork is free-form, from my imagination. This one lacks great composition really, but I love the painting and a dear lady-friend will love my rendering (hopefully!) if I can get pretty close, with a 3D touch obviously...

Here's a bad photo of the painting itself:

(I'll post a better one with a real camera soon...)

Started off modeling all the stonework, the gazebo and table, and nCloth for the tablecloth.

May unify the gazebo structure and take it into Mudbox for some detailing, but at this point I'm happy with the perspective and whatnot.

Adding some initial flowers, bushes, and textures. Most of this will change depending, and the ground texture is purely a placeholder:

And an initial render, minus the bushes and distant grass objects:

This one's easily broken into foreground and background scenes, I hope! Any input would be appreciated, a long way to go still and only a few days in which to get it done!

__________________Commodore 64 @ 1MHz
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"Like stone we battle the wind... Beat down and strangle the rains..."

Two things I notice of course while posting: some of the flowers have no y-rotation randomization yet, and the ground shader is too reflective and needs a lot of work still. Leaves on the trees need some work too. Making some progress though!

__________________Commodore 64 @ 1MHz
64KB RAM
1541 Floppy Drive

"Like stone we battle the wind... Beat down and strangle the rains..."

Quote:The grouts seem a bit wide, at least it´s hard for me to read the scale. And the stone of the greek styled building is a bit rough for my taste

@Walli: I very much agree, gotta work up a new, cleaner yet dirtied and more detailed texture for the ground. Maybe displacement will help bring out more details, too. Thanks for taking the time, feel free to rip this project apart, as I sure could use good critique.

Update: broke out a tripod, borrowed a camera (previous pic was with an old Storm), and did my best. Not a great photographer - I've been doing the scene by eye up until now, as it's on the wall by my computer while I work on this.

Foreground progress... Sculpted up some nicer colums, adding more flowers and foliage:

And using a new "trick" to paint denser instances more rapidly, but this render I forgot to unhide a bunch of stuff... Still, progress:

Tree leaves are looking horrible now, must have plugged in something wrong... Flower colorings are just placeholder, and I'll be controlling them with a projection colormap next to match the variations in the painting better. Long way to go!

__________________Commodore 64 @ 1MHz
64KB RAM
1541 Floppy Drive

"Like stone we battle the wind... Beat down and strangle the rains..."

The ground has to go, swapping in a Muddy ground instead. And a great many more small flowers I think, followed by the more dynamic and colorful projection texture to attempt to match the color scheme of the original...

I'm happy with the foreground low foliage at this point, though! Hard to achieve proper density sometimes, and the texturing's a little off still (as I'm trying more to match the palette of the painting than all the fine details...) The midground bushes are too dark now, I fear that I threw them into shadow with some off-camera trees instead of the fore-left flowers, which need a bit more shade.

Any thoughts? Putting the wine glasses and chairs in tonight, and maybe I'll Muddy up the top of the column structure (gazebo?) to bring out more detail.

__________________Commodore 64 @ 1MHz
64KB RAM
1541 Floppy Drive

"Like stone we battle the wind... Beat down and strangle the rains..."

Quote:the hedge in the back is to dark for my taste and the texture of building does not fit that well I think. On the columns the bump is to strong.

Looking forward to see some flower variations ;-)

@Walli: Agreed entirely. I think some off-scene trees on the left are casting too much shadow on those bushes now, but they do need a lighter shader as well. Or it could be the preview-quality FG filtering, or both of course.

I smoothed the normals on the columns for the next render and that should help a bit (we'll see in the next render), and the flower variations are mainly in color as opposed to adding more original flowers. I can see four types of flowers in the painting foreground - I've got four so far, but may replace one if it's not helping.

The trick is shading - it's a nightmare to make forty or fifty different shaders for the same flowers, so I'm using a projection method to kinda outline the various color-groups and their positions. So far it's a top-down projection, but I may do a camera (screen space) one as well and blend the two with a nice fractal mask or something.

Did some work on that part just now:

Using the photo I took for color-dropping, it's fun to note that while the flowers seem white or pink or orange, their colors are really much more muted. The whites are more blues, and the pinks are almost bruised browns. Not sure if I'll have to crank the gamma up in the render yet though - tonight's test should tell the tale!

Thanks for your input.

Quote:its nice but follow walli's advice and use real grass rather than texture for the back.

@murtazarazvi: Yes, I have the scene divided up into the foreground and background scenes (separate, but with many same flower assets), as those bushes in the center divide it really nicely. The distant grass in the foreground renders is purely placeholder, for sure. Posted that in the first post but it does get lost at the bottom, and I have a good 30M polys in grass for the background scene, which I'll post a render of soon as well! The good news is that all the assets (flowers, trees, bushes) are pretty much the same except for that one, lone pine or conifer back there... Gotta make a new pine to fit the scene, probably.

Thanks for chiming in, please give me some hell when I post up the background renders too? I really need the critique; my eyes tend to miss a lot of details when I've been staring at something for too long especially.

__________________Commodore 64 @ 1MHz
64KB RAM
1541 Floppy Drive

"Like stone we battle the wind... Beat down and strangle the rains..."

@tobbew: Yep, using mental ray, and indeed the data shaders seem pretty cool! Alas, they are a bit beyond my technical level. Bitter (Remydrh at the mi forums, or "David", the person responding in that post and a good e-friend of mine here, although he likely thinks I'm some sniveling noob) has been very helpful trying to get me up to speed on those, but alas it's a mental ray standalone thing, and a bit beyond my capabilities so far. For scenes like this I prefer visual feedback inside Maya, and could never even come close to making the data shaders work.

Luckily this painting has batches of color as opposed to each flower being totally different from the one next to it, mostly anyway. If the top-down projection doesn't produce good results, I'll go with a camera projection and just paint the projected texture up good in Photoshop.

Quote:ok, now i get it, that u r using as a reference. one more thing the tilling on floor is big scale them down and should look better. keep it up.

@murtazarazvi: Thanks! I agree, the floor/ground isn't great yet. Too even and 90°-ish for sure, and too big scale-wise as well. I'm going to sculpt and paint up a new ground in Mudbox to replace this one; sometimes texture-maps alone just can't do the trick!

__________________Commodore 64 @ 1MHz
64KB RAM
1541 Floppy Drive

"Like stone we battle the wind... Beat down and strangle the rains..."

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